Africans face long wait for unproven Ebola drug

Thursday

Aug 7, 2014 at 12:01 AMAug 8, 2014 at 11:51 AM

MONROVIA, Liberia - Africans seeking a drug to help contain the Ebola virus will have to wait months before a potentially life-saving experimental treatment used on two infected Americans is produced, even in small amounts, officials said. And there are no guarantees that the medication, known as ZMapp, would help curb the spread of the dreaded disease.

MONROVIA, Liberia — Africans seeking a drug to help contain the Ebola virus will have to wait months before a potentially life-saving experimental treatment used on two infected Americans is produced, even in small amounts, officials said.

And there are no guarantees that the medication, known as ZMapp, would help curb the spread of the dreaded disease.

Supplies of the drug are limited. It has never been tested for safety or effectiveness in humans.

The health minister of Nigeria, one of the four countries where Ebola has broken out, told a news conference in his country that he had asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about access to the drug. A CDC spokesman said yesterday “there are virtually no doses available.”

Some people in other affected countries questioned why the medicine has not been offered to infected Africans.

Anthony Kamara, a 27-year-old man in Freetown, Sierra Leone, said, “Americans are very selfish. They only care about the lives of themselves and no one else.”

He referred to ZMapp as “the miracle serum” that the United States has “refused to share with us to save African lives.”

The lack of wider availability “shows simply that white patients and black patients do not have the same value in the eyes of world medicine,” said Nouridine Sow, a sociology professor at the Universal Institute of Guinea.

Yesterday, Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified at an emergency hearing that his agency has more than 200 staff members in Atlanta working on the outbreak and soon will have more than 50 disease experts in western Africa.

Frieden said it is unclear whether experimental treatments given to two infected U.S. aid workers ultimately will be effective. The two are now being cared for at Emory University in Georgia.

“Until we do a study, we don’t know if it helps, if it hurts or if it doesn’t make any difference,” he told a health symposium in Kentucky.

In another development yesterday, Tekmira Pharmaceutical Corp. said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had modified its clinical hold status on Tekmira’s experimental Ebola treatment to enable its potential use in humans infected with the virus.

On Wednesday, the World Health Organization said it would convene a meeting of medical ethics experts next week to consider the implications of making experimental Ebola drugs more widely available.

Tekmira’s Ebola treatment is one of three worldwide that have shown especially promising results in monkeys, but it is unproven in humans.

The Obama administration also announced yesterday that it is forming a special working group to consider setting policy for the potential use of experimental drugs.

The U.S. group will include scientists and officials from such agencies as the National Institutes of Health and the CDC, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The outbreak first emerged in Guinea and spread to neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia before reaching Nigeria. Almost 1,000 people have died since March.

Some health experts fear that debate over extremely limited supplies of ZMapp will distract from more tried-and-true practices — identifying, isolating and aggressively treating the sick.

Fauci said the drug manufacturer has told the U.S. government that it would take two to three months to produce just “a modest amount.”

“We don’t even know if it works,” he stressed.

Underscoring desperate attempts to stop the disease, troops in full combat gear deployed in the rain to block people traveling to Liberia’s capital from rural areas hit by Ebola. Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf declared a national state of emergency, and officials said yesterday that no one with a fever would be allowed in or out of the country.

In Sierra Leone, military forces deployed as part of “Operation Octopus” that officials said is aimed at preventing “the unauthorized movement of Ebola-infected persons.”

Liberia and Sierra Leone account for more than 60 percent of Ebola deaths, according to the WHO.

The unprecedented measures came after a man sick with Ebola in Liberia boarded a flight and ended up in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, where a nurse who treated him is now dead from the disease and several other people are infected. The traveler also died.

Ebola is spread only through direct contact with the bodily fluids of people showing symptoms.

Information from Reuters was included in this story.

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